This course provides an overview of the issue of postharvest loss of grains by exploring essential physical, technical, and social dimensions of postharvest supply chains and loss prevention methods globally.
Each year, estimates suggest that 1/3 of all food produced is lost or wasted, making postharvest loss a critical global food security and sustainability issue of today. Key knowledge areas are presented including:
-An overview of postharvest loss
-Supply chain activities such as harvesting, drying, and storage
-Economics and markets
-An introduction to the network of actors working in this field
We face the immense challenge of feeding over 9 billion people by the year 2050. To meet these demands, yields will have to more than double using the same amount of natural resources. In recent years, postharvest loss has been recognized by major institutions including the US government, the United Nations, the CGIAR Research Consortium, and several others as a significant opportunity to impact food security and improve livelihoods. Despite this increased attention, a lack of knowledge, technical capacity, and resources remain obstacles for stakeholders worldwide to act on these issues. This course will, for the first time, provide you as professionals, practitioners, and students, with a comprehensive introduction to postharvest loss processes and begin building capacity for loss prevention worldwide.

Impartido por:

Dr. Prasanta Kalita

Transcripción

I am Prasanta Kalita. I am a professor in Agriculture and Biological Engineering Department here at the University of Illinois. I have been here for the last 15 years. My professional background is mostly in water and sustainability. I started working recently on postharvest losses and prevention. I am the new director of the institute, we call it ADM Institute for the Prevention of Postharvest Loss. We want to start with some introduction of the postharvest losses. What is it? Why do we have to worry about it or what are we going to do about it? How is that related to our lives? How is that related to our society? As you know, by 2050, the way the world population is increasing, we'll not have enough food to feed everybody. So adding on the global food production, in order to feed those people, we have to increase our production by 70% or so to feed the people. How do we arrange that? How do we manage to feed the people? Many of us are here at the university, the land grant university. We are pioneers in agricultural production. We have helped solving many problems in many parts of the world. So we come back to the agriculture. That is the key to alleviate the global food problem out there. The answer is we need to increase the production to feed these people. Can we do that? Are we limited by anything? Yes, we are. The land that we inhabit is very limited, and for example, of the arable land, that means the land we use to produce crops, are very limited. We all know how limited water and energy is. In our total usable water that we have, 70% of the usable water is put into agriculture and then rest is into your domestic and industrial purpose. The land, you can think of, we have by 2030, food demands that will require another 200 million more hectares of land, which is about the size of Canada and the US. We don't have that much land. Think about it now, that although on the one hand, to feed the people, we need more food. On the other hand, our resources are limited. What does that tell us? We probably are limited to increase food production. By 2050, we'll have 9 million people. How do we feed them? So that's the pickle. That is the main thing for this course, that we are going to help, that we want to talk to you about. What are our alternatives? And that's why this course, the PostHarvest Loss Prevention comes into picture. What is postharvest loss and why should we be worried about it? Right now, the current estimate is about one-third of all food that we produce is lost or wasted. In 2011, the United Nations FAO, they published a report of their study called Global Food Loss and Food Waste, and that's where they put all this data that they found from this study. That sparked the interest of the whole global community. What's the difference between postharvest loss and waste? The postharvest loss, it happens from the production level from harvesting of the crop all the way to the retail. The waste is when the losses happen at the consumer level. They waste a lot of food, for example, you have lots of food on your plate, and you don't need to eat all that and then you waste it. So that's a small example out there. Here, you will see that the food loss versus food waste happens at many different levels in different countries. In developed countries like Europe or North America, and mostly in the industrialized Asian countries, we have a significantly higher food loss at consumer level. Look at the other, in Africa, in Latin America, and other areas, we have a lot of more postharvest laws that happens from production to retailing out there. The reason that we have more losses in the development, they don't have infrastructure. From let's say, harvesting, these people do it manually, with sickle and they may not be able to harvest that crop at the right time. Maybe there is rain, they don't have the equipment, they don't have the labor, maybe the owner is sick during the time of the harvest. There can be various things, no structure right at the harvesting, then they don't have the mechanism to dry that crop. If you don't dry it and store it, you can grow molds on it, so you lose a signficant percent. Then they don't have the storage facilities. Wherever you store it, whether in a bag or in a simple storage building out there, you might lose a lot, a significant percent of your crop that you put in the capacity will be lost. And then, they don't have a good infrastructure in milling and in the market, the small holder farmers, many of them don't have the market facility. In addition to that, they do not have the good policies for food sale pricing and all those kind of things. Let's talk about how these losses happen in different parts of the world, are they same? Let's say if we have rice, or wheat, or corn, maize, whatever, are these losses same from location to location, or in the same location, are all these different grains have the similar kind of losses? Let's talk about just South and Southeast Asia. These are the many different processes of the postharvest loss, say handling storage, processing, packaging, distribution and consumption are allowed there. Look at this, the losses are different for different crops. Processing and packaging contributes significant losses in fruits and vegetable, than in cereal out there. Look at the next one. In this chart here, we are looking at the postharvest losses at various different processes, starting from harvesting, threshing, drying, storage, and milling in China versus rest of Asia. We can see, even in China, we have significant need for storage, significant need for milling the production losses out there. The milling technology, probably for rice milling technology in China is better than rest of Asia, so you see that lower than the rest of others are. Others are all higher because their production is also very high so you compare that, in the same proportion their losses are also very high. Now let's look at within one country, let's look at the estimated postharvest loss of black grain, this is kind of a lentil in India. Even within developing countries some part of that country maybe a little bit more mechanized, they might have mechanized agriculture. Some of their states or regions may not have that thing and here is a good example. Maharashtra, this is a state where Mumbai is located, it's a very advanced city compared to many of the other Indian cities. Madhya Pradesh is in the central state in India. This is relatively low economy and they do not have many of the industries there. You can look at that in the harvesting, for example, you have a lot more losses here, more than 10% losses in harvesting because, for the simple reason, they do not have mechanized harvesting. They don't have the machines. Many of these things probably is done by the farmers there. In the same way, if you look at even the drying, comparing this to different regions, look at the drying losses are much higher there. There could be many different factors that are going into that. It's not very simple. It's a very complicated systems when you look at the postharvest loss. The reason I wanted to show you just only to make one thing clear. Even if you look at one crop, one food in one country in two different locations, you cannot generalize. It's a very complicated system. We said at the beginning, we don't have enough food to feed everybody if our population grows at the current rate and if we do not increase our production. Our second message was, we need to reduce the losses from what we already produce, because we do not have enough resources to grow more food. Land is limited, water is limited, energy is limited. So that's our second message. The thought is, the investment that is needed to reduce the loss is lot smaller than the investment otherwise we'll need to produce more food. I haven't talked much about the business. I haven't talked much about the market. I haven't gone into details of what are, let's say, many different drying technology or storage facilities in Africa or India or in the US. In many parts of the world, even if the technology is there, people do not use it. There are drying technologies for developing countries but still they lose a significant amount of crop from lack of drying because simply, they do not know. Education is the prime limitation. Information is not given to farmers, given to people out there. This class is not made for college students, or for farmers, or for policy makers, or for practitioners. This class is for everybody to know the issues of food service losses and what we can do. If everybody can chip in a little bit, whether through information, through education, through changing a design or adopting a simple low-cost technology, if everyone can contribute a little bit, we are going to solve a big problem. Let's say we lose 30% of the crop today. If everybody, if all the farmers, students, policy maker, everybody synergistically put some effort, even if we can reduce 5%, we feed many many million people in the world. The purpose of this course is to bring that sensation among people. That means we need to do something. We just can't let this food get lost or be wasted out there. Let's everybody do something and save some of the food. We may not be able to save all the 30% of the loss in one day or one year or a hundred years, but if we can save it, maybe in proportion of the population growth, we'll be contributing to our humanity.